Featured Poet: Helen Oswald

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Helen Oswald (pictured) to these pages this Friday, one of the last of the short-lived British summer.  Oswald’s debut collection Learning Gravity, from Tall-Lighthouse, has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010. Her earlier pamphlet, The Dark Skies Society, was published by Waterloo Press.  Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and poetry magazines, including Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma and Poetry London. She has received three commendations in the National Poetry Competition, is a past winner of the Arvon International and has won prizes in other competitions including the Bridport.

After training as a journalist, Helen went on to work as an editor at Amnesty International and then developed a career in the trade union movement. She is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and currently works from home in Brighton as a writer and editor.  I am excited to hear her read for Oxfam on September 29 in London.

Ordering Genes

We are what our grandparents ate.

Their choices from the cold store ordered my genes

so that a grapefruit dissected with the proper tool

and eaten by my grandma on the eve of war

accounts for this bitterness I sometimes feel.

And maybe that extra cow’s-lick of butter

churned from grandpa’s Irish herd,

scooped up on his initialled silver blade

passed down to my own cutlery drawer,

has marked me too; my slick, emollient tongue.

I have no children of my own

but today I select with care: mussels in their shells,

unscrubbed; hake, the deep sea gleam

still polished in its eye; tomatoes not yet ripe,

their stubborn grip on the vine.

poem by Helen Oswald